my life is just too complicated
It’s just plain hard to explain what I do. For many people it’s too complicated and therefore confusing; for mass media, it’s hard to boil down to a snappy title. I have 4 roles, 3 titles, hold positions with 2 organizations, but just 1 paycheck, for those of you who are counting. The titles: Executive Director, Director of Asian American Church Research, Director of Digital Initiatives. The organizations: L2 Foundation and Leadership Network. I’m in Dallas at the moment serving in my role as a live-blogger on a facilitation team for an Encore Generation Leadership Community. To encapsulate all of this, I find myself gravitating towards using a generic “non-profit consultant” to describe my work.
[update 10/9] Just found this book, One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success, by Marci Alboher that describes this kind of a complicated career life.
This article, A New Kind of Body by L.L. Barkat, finally shows up as an online exclusive at Today’s Christian, September/October 2007 issue, and describes me as a ‘church-growth consultant’:
Mark’s experience resembles that of DJ Chuang, a former pastor and current church-growth consultant who promotes the health of Asian American congregations. DJ lives in Washington, D.C., but says blogging helps him form “relationships across the miles.” It’s not surprising, then, that he recently brainstormed with two church-planting blogging associates who reside in San Francisco and Malaysia.
:
DJ Chuang finds blogging exciting for similar reasons, albeit with a leader’s perspective. First, he notes that bloggers have authentic, energetic, personal voices, as opposed to the “sanitized and filtered” nature of voices in other media. “Blogging is a new way to communicate that can bypass media gatekeepers,” he says. “In the church, it empowers people in the pews to have a voice—not just the pastor and leaders.”
That interview for the blogging article above was dated a while back, when I used to live in Washington, D.C. I’ve been in Orange County, California, since August 2007.
And, for the record, I’m not ordained, so I don’t deserve the honorific title “Rev.” as cited in last Saturday’s Los Angeles Times article.
